Meta Platforms on Monday announced it’s bringing advertising to its popular messaging application WhatsApp, but emphasized that all the ads are “built with privacy in mind.” The new ads are expected to be displayed on the Updates tab through its Stories-like Status feature, which allows for the ephemeral sharing of photos. These monetization efforts are currently “rolling out gradually,” according to the company, and will not affect personal chats, which will remain ad-free. The media giant, which had acquired WhatsApp for a record $19.3 billion in February 2014, first announced its plans for ads in Status way back in November 2018.
Meta has also claimed that the new ads implementation was developed in the “most privacy-oriented way possible” by their engineering teams.
The company has stated that it only uses very limited information to serve ads to its billions of users around the world. “Your personal messages, calls, and statuses remain end-to-end encrypted, meaning no one can see or hear them,” the company said. “To show ads in Status or Channels you might care about, we’ll use limited info like your country or city, language, and the Channels you’re following.”
The company will also use ad preferences from a user’s other accounts, including Facebook and Instagram, if they are linked.
It is worth noting that the exact nature of the information that is collected by Meta for these new WhatsApp ads is quite extensive. This includes the user’s country code and age, various device information such as language settings, and also the user’s general location. Activity information on the Status and Channels features, such as the channels people follow and how they interact with ads, is also collected. Furthermore, Meta has said it will neither sell nor share users’ phone numbers with any marketers for any advertising purposes. It will also not tap into users’ personal messages, calls, and groups for any of its ad targeting on the popular platform.
This recent development comes as Meta has added a new warning prompt to its Meta AI chatbot app before letting users share their prompts. This change follows many recent reports of users accidentally sharing chats with very sensitive personal information on the public Discover feed. Privacy and security experts have widely criticized the feature, with the Mozilla Foundation stating the app does not make it clear. It stated the app does not make it clear that the prompts users share are accessible to anyone across the entire world. A message now reads, “Prompts you post are public and visible to everyone. Avoid sharing personal or sensitive information.”
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